Opinion pieces give us a mix of advice

THE ODT has done us proud, printing three opinion pieces on one page.

In today’s paper (ODT, 1.9.22), Karl du Fresne, the rightwing blogger sets out to damn the leftwing establishment and by implication the present Labour Government by implying they are somehow responsible for the alleged journalistic shortcomings of the Fire and Fury documentary.

His main criticism is that it fails to give equal exposure to every lunatic fellow traveller element participating in the parliamentary occupation.

I don’t see that it is obliged to. You only had to check out the pedigree of some of the participants and watch some of the Counterspin broadcasts to see the justification for the project.

Would you have given Lord Hawhaw (William Joyce) anything more than a brief sample of his Nazi propaganda to remind listeners what the Allies were up against?

There were misguided naive people there initially, but many departed when it belatedly dawned on them the risk of hijacking by extreme elements.

This is always a risk in public protests. I well remember the ‘‘rent a crowd’’ accusations during the Vietnam and Springbok protests.

The ‘‘silent majority’’ was an older generation’s unverifiable euphemism frequently deployed to persuade.

On the same page, Joe Bennett provides some sage advice.

Part of the problem is the alltoocommon human tendency to prefer the excitingly false to the plainly true. The internet and social media makes the excitingly false available to almost everyone.

Joe concludes by asking: ‘‘Does this destroy faith in the common truth and thus destabilise societies with a view to defeating them? Or is that just a conspiracy theory?’’

Richard Shaw of Massey University, in a third opinion piece on the same page, answers Joe’s question with: ‘‘Not so many years ago people laughed at the idea that extremeright populists could win parliamentary seats. Noone’s laughing any more.’’ Stuart Mathieson

Palmerston